McKenzie Wark on Thu, 12 Jun 1997 18:16:43 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> worlds without number |
Worlds without number I was intrigued by the post Marina sent about the two species of monsters at the nettime conference. I don't really understand it, frankly, perhaps because i wasn't there. So i'll just nibble away at the edges of some things i think i can work out. She refered to the disappearance of the second world, and the threat to eastern europe of falling into the third world, not to mention the recognition in the east that there are other things to aspire to than joining the first world. My immediate reaction was to wonder whether the first and third worlds might have disappeared too. Which is not the same thing as saying that underdevelopment has disappeared. Rather, that these things don't distribute themselves into geographically identifiable worlds any more. Or perhaps, there are now worlds without number, little abstract spheres of investment, dependency and (under) development. All sitting side by side in physical space, but threated together by the vectors of communication, trade and migration. I was living in Brooklyn for a while this year. I noticed that all the buildings around me were the type once called 'light industrial'. Only the industry was of course all gone. A couple of these buildings had smash repair shops for cars going on, but all of the tool and die, all the furnishing and woodwork and metalwork shops -- all gone. The rag trade was recolonising a lot of the space. Asian guys would pull up in beat up old Ford transits, and Asian women would appear at the loading dock with racks of cheap and nasty looking denim dresses and other basic apparel. Judging by what was on the racks, this is basic, low skill stuff, right here in one of the five boroughs of New York city. I saw clothes like these in the stores in Brooklyn. It looked like a general spiral of decline was going on -- incomes declining from lack of jobs, lack of jobs due to low income and hence demand. A third world in the making. But not the kind of third world where poverty results from an incomplete or failed transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Quite the reverse -- a failed transition from an industrial economy to -- what? Just as developmentalists used to talk about 'takeoff', as if there was a natural economic progression from agricultural to industrial economy (except of course when politics fucks it up), so too the rosy scenarios today all assume the postindustrial transition is just a given. But clearly it isn't. The political unconscious of the cyber revolution in America is that most of industrial America is not going to make it. So the first world isn't what it used to be. I find it curious that anyone would disparage government schemes to create jobs in the UK or anywhere else in Europe. Let's face it, if the governments don't make jobs there, nobody else will. Why employ those stroppy Europeans when there are better educated workforces elsewhere with fewer ancillary demands on their agenda? The threat to European jobs isn't so much 'cheap labour' elsewhere as smart labour. There just isn't any monopoly on skill there any more. Nor on infrastructure. If you need roads and power plants and ports -- that kind of intrastructure is developing all over the place, but particularly in Asia. Even more to the point -- capital formation is no longer restricted to the old 'first world'. Its not a question of western capital migrating to Asia. Its a question of Asian capital investing closer to home. There are lots of new jobs being created all the time -- in Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, China... The growth rates in some of these countries is sometimes in double digits. So you have the opposite kind of spiral in Bangkok to what you have in Brooklyn. Thailand has its problems at the moment, but a lot of them are from growing too fast. There's so much investment concentrated in one place that its choking the infrastructure. Its putting so much wealth into the hands of a rising middle class that there's an orgy of spending, which in turn spurs investment, and so on. The communication networks that make all this ASian growth possible are nothing like either the first world or the second. These countries are "guided democracies" at best and dictatorships at worst. Even in fairly liberal countries like Thailand, there is a great deal of monitoring and steering of media agendas. What has grown in a really amazing way are business networks. I don't know what the volume of communication traffic is like, but judging from the growth of a whole layer of communication professionals across the region, it must be substantial. These people are no longer the go-betweens for first world capital investing in the developing world. They are intermediaries between capital rich Japan (and increasingly Korea and Taiwan too) and resource rich countries such as China and Indonesia. What's interesting is the way leaving the third world has changed these societies. A self conscious middle class with a stake in some media autonomy, rule of law, due process, etc has arisen in Taiwan and Korea, and i think now Thailand and the Philipines too. The first rumblings of it are happening in Indonesia, i think. That's a vast and complex country, and i just read the tea leaves from afar, but i think its fair to say that in this, the fourth most populous countryin the world, the old autocracy is strugging to channel a rising educated class into its networks of power and patronage. A lot of independent media networks work through the NGOs in the region, and have done so for a very, very long time, as opposed to the Eastern European experience with this, which looks much more recent. I think if there's a connection that would be worth making, its between that older NGO experience and the newer one. There's a difference in that in, say Thailand, NGO work is more about coping with what (and who) gets trampled on in the rush to development, for example, what's left of the peasant economy, and the damage done by the sex industry since HIV. But there is definitely a para-public sphere of NGO activity. I must say, i always took a more benign view of this than some of our friends do of NGO activity in former second world. Comparing, say, Malaysia to Thailand, there's two paths there that i can see for the second world. In Thailand, development is centred on Bangkok. There's very little 'trickle down' to the regions. There's a very wide income gap. There's what's left of a peasant economy just left to struggle along. Part of Thailand is now locked into a trade and investment regime in the region -- Japanese firms using the skill/price point Thai workers are at -- which is 'mid range' -- and threading that into a 'greater east asian co-prosperity sphere'. The high skill, high wage stuff is in Japan, but moving out to Korea and Taiwan. The mid level work is in Thailand, Malaysia, etc. The low wage, low skill parts of the production process are in Indonesia, and moving to Vietnam. As skill and wage rates rise, the parts of the production process move 'down' a rung. Its been going on like that for 20 years. Big corporations in Korea and to a lesser extent elsewhere are catching on to this development plan. Malaysia is trying to establish itself as a 'centre' rather than a periphery in these kinds of circuits, at least in some industries. The Malaysian car company Proton bought the English firm of Lotus in an effort to get the high skill, design and technology stuff happening in Malaysia, at least in this one industry -- and sneak up on the Koreans, who are rapidly pulling along side the Japanese as carmakers to the world. (Europeans are still driving Renaults and VWs, but the rest of the world seems to be driving Toyotas and Nissans, and trading them in for Hyundais and Daiwoos...). Now, in Thailand, you see bits of the place detaching themselves (so to speak) from the Thai territory and economy and drifting into the orbit of the co-prosperity sphere. In Malaysia you see a national development policy that tries to keep all of the regions and classes more or less in the development process. This policy doesn't result so much from enlightened liberalism as expediency. Malaysia is multiracial, Thailand isn't. A similar accident of history led to a similar bifurcation of policies in Korea as compared to Taiwan. Korean development was very harsh, and led to intense political struggles -- the Korean student radicals are the best organised i have seen anywhere in the world. The KMT government in Taiwan kept para-social democratic welfare policies in place since 1947 -- a legacy of its peculiar political history. All of which leads to incredible debates. I can't really follow this, but i get some insight into it through teaching communications at a graduate level to mostly Asian students. Interestingly, whereas Asian students i get in Australia tend to be less affluent than the ones i meet in America. They are an upwardly mobile strata from the lower middle class, doing a cheaper and more 'practical' course. There's a stong sense of anti-western, anti-european feeling. A sense of coming to power. This is of course quite justified -- in relative terms the economic power of the 'first world' is declining rapidly. But i sense also a great deal of confusion about issues of culture and polity. As beneficiaries of more or less authoritarian state development policies, democracy is seen, not as a necessary ingredient for development, but a luxury, or just a weird western thing. This is changing in those countries where that policy has ground to a halt. Its obvious in Korea particularly that the authoritarian state might have marched development up to a certain point, but then the corruption endemic to such a system catches up to it. But its less obvious in, say China or Indonesia, where state-backed development really did deliver what it promised to a lot of people. The really scary thing about Singapore, i find whenever i go there, is that it is STALINISM THAT WORKS. The ruling party there has socialist roots, but it went for a mixed economy development strategy very early, and it worked. Incomes grew, and the party kept its grip, relaxing it just enough to stop dissent from becoming focussed. Harry Lee succeeded where the eastern bloc failed. So, in short, the third world isn't where it used to be. Its mutated into worlds-within-worlds of development and underdevelopment. The first world isn't there any more either, in the sense that it just doesn't set the agenda. (It will be interesting to see who sucks up to China when HK gets handed back next month. Clinton is making a stand for the place, but i bet nobody else will. Australia will send a high ranging member of cabinet to the ceremony -- this is our second biggest trading partner after all...). Europe is clearly in a reactive phase. Its exports are less and less competitive on world markets. Workers are well enough organised that they can defend their incomes and their share of the state booty. The only market up for grabs is the domestic one, still pretty well protected from real competition. But the only choices are between more or less unfair ways of managing decline. The blue sky for European capital is its own co-prosperity sphere -- taking in bits of the former East, and trying to integrate them into a virtous circle of investment, production, income growth and market growth, but the pockets where this is possible are pretty small, and there may be no reason why European capital has any great advantage over its international rivals, even this close to home. I suspect the pain of keeping the 'overdeveloped' partrs of europe together politically is going to be pretty intense. My feeling about this is coloured by Australian experience. This is a much more vulnerable bit of the first world, one not protected by the security blanket of the EU, and much closer to where the economic action has been for the last 20 years. Employment held up pretty well over the last 10 years -- better than the OECD average, but inflated by a huge growth in the tourism industry. For the last couple of years its looked pretty bleak, and we've had the two predictable political movements -- the free marketeers, and their quest to make the world safe for capital flight; and the rise of populist statism, seeking a return to an aborted authoritarian developmental state -- a policy abandoned after the war. The latter is of marginal significance yet, and mostly its the racist side of this movement that's attracting attention. But the combination of hostility to migrating bodies and migrating capital is a very potent and dangerous one. I think i started this long netletter to clarify for myself why i keep reading the east/west dialogue on nettime awry. It seems to me that there's an east/west europe dialogue, with many variants and flavours. This is a good thing. Then there's a third leg to the discussion, which is contact with the Americans. That's a whole other matrix, of which cyberlibertarianism is just a part. That the dialogue extend to this is also good. But there's still lots of worlds that are not factored into this matrix. That's nobody's fault. This is not a whinge about 'exclusion'. I just want to expand the picture a little. Its all very well to talk about 'capital' in the abstract, as capital *is* abstract. But one needs to know something about which way that abstract flow is heading, so one can anticipate which particulars it will organise around itself. Nettime is unique in lots of ways, but one of them is that it is a pan European movement (if i may be so bold as to call something this turbulent a 'movement', nonetheless) that is happening at a time of European decline. None of the historic avant gardes had that distinction. The desires of the old avant gardes, no matter how much i always admired them, seemed to me mired in empire, in ways that were never really clearly articulated. Even the situs. Products of an empire in bloom. How times change. McKenzie Wark The Netletter 2AM Eastern Standard Time 13-06-97 __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de